The comedian Maurizio Crozza does a glorious impersonation of Italy's centre-left leader, Walter Veltroni, trying to reach out to the widest possible constituency. (Sample rhetoric: "We need to state, firmly and plainly, that we're with the young people on short-term contracts - but also with the employers who exploit them.")

For Crozza, Veltroni is head of the Italian But-also-ist party (a new idea, for sure, but also an old one).

His satire brings into cruelly sharp focus the central doubt about Veltroni: whether he is too keen to be liked; whether he could take the unpopular decisions needed to reanimate Europe's most moribund economy.

The former mayor of Rome is a paradoxical figure. He comes across as rather lugubrious, yet is possessed of Sarkozy-like energy and a CV as interesting as any in European politics. How many leaders, for example, could lay claim to the authorship of a couple of novels, dashed off while running their country's capital?

Veltroni was born in 1955. His father, a broadcasting executive, died when he was a year old; his mother was the daughter of a Slovene diplomat, the ambassador to the Holy See of what was then Yugoslavia.

As a teenager, Veltroni became immersed in the politics of the Italian Communist party (PCI), and at the age of only 21 was elected to the Rome city council. The following year, he was made a member of the PCI's central committee.

From there, in 1992, he was parachuted into the editorship of the party's daily, L'Unita. By then, the PCI had renounced Marxism and changed itself into the Party of the Democratic Left.

Veltroni invested huge amounts of energy in transforming a party mouthpiece into a readable, middle-brow, centre-left broadsheet. One of his executives recalls that he never once managed to get to the office earlier than the boss.

In 1994, Veltroni stood unsuccessfully for the PDS leadership. But when, two years later, Romano Prodi came to office as head of Italy's first, postwar leftwing government, he made the young Veltroni his deputy, giving him the arts and sports portfolio.

That points to another handicap, however: Veltroni has never held down a heavyweight post in government. He is vulnerable to the criticism that his interests are essentially related to media and leisure. In addition to his novels, he has written books on football, cinema and jazz.

He can win elections, though. In 2006, after five years as mayor of Rome, he got himself re-elected with a thumping 62% of the vote. And at the start of this campaign, he latched onto Barack Obama's early successes to portray himself as the US Democrat's European equivalent: the man who would surprise everyone by outpacing the favourite. His hopes of doing so now rest with the large number of voters who, pollsters say, remain undecided but fundamentally more left than rightwing in their outlook.